As a writer, blogger, and serial emailer, you can imagine that I go through repeating myself several times throughout an average day. Those precious keystrokes take time and the more time you take, the less time you have. I need my time, which means that I need a program along the lines of Auto Text Expander.

Auto Text Expander ($29.95) for Windows allows you to associate blocks of text — be it plain text, rich text, and/or images — to abbreviations or keyboard macros. When typing those abbreviations or macros, the snippet of text associated will be triggered. Read on through this post to learn more about the program, and enter your information at the end if interested in winning one of 25 licensed copies of Auto Text Expander for Windows, retailing at nearly $750 in total!

Auto Text Expander works on both Windows and Mac (but we’re only giving away the Windows version). After installing the application, launching ought to look like this:

You can see that several default snippets have been set up for you to help familiarize you with the program’s features. Right off the bat, you can begin to feel the effects. Bring up Notepad and type in cdati, which you can see is the abbreviation trigger for Current Date and Time.

It could take up to about a second for the program to automatically replace the abbreviation (depending on how mean your system is), but you’ll hear a sound and there you have it. That’s the primary function of Auto Text Expander. While it seems incredibly simple, I’m sure you’re already able to think of instances where it’d be incredibly useful.

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If you click the Statistics button across the top, you’re able to see exactly how many keystrokes you’ve saved, and translate that to how much time you’ve saved on a WPM basis.

New snippets can be organized into groups, allowing you to really keep your snippets efficient and clean to search through. With these groups, you can create manual backups to ensure that you never waste spending the time to recreate them.

Under the Insert menu, you can see a large list of variables that you can include in your snippets. %B will dynamically replace as the full name of the current month, for example. These are very useful.

Options are very extensive with Auto Text Expander. You can set Auto Text Expander to work with only certain applications, which is very useful in certain situations. You can also set abbreviations to be case sensitive.

Automated backups are also a very appreciated feature. As you can see, I am running my backups right through Dropbox.

Hotkeys allow you to easily control Auto Text Expander by adding new snippets, opening the application, or enabling/disabling the application.

Auto Text Expander has so, so many uses and it’s truly a program that anyone can use and benefit from. Wasting less time and getting our text out faster is something we could all be doing, so let’s do it! You can buy Auto Text Expander for Windows for just $29.95, or if you’re lucky you could be one of the 25 that we select to win it for free in this giveaway!

How do I win a copy?

Step 1: Fill in the giveaway form

Please fill in the form with your real name and email address so that we can get in touch if you are chosen as a winner. MakeUseOf giveaways are open to readers worldwide.

Congratulations! If you were selected as a winner, you would have received your license via email from jackson@makeuseof.com. If you require any assistance, please get in touch with jackson@makeuseof.com before Dec 8. Enquires beyond this date will not be entertained.